[baq]

The sales pitch is the difference between being a programmer and an engineer: one writes code, the other solves business problems. The value delivered by good engineering may be less than a lucky coder who doesn't have time to learn the tools of the trade, but this is expected: engineering is making sure luck doesn't matter for the business, within the operational envelope and in the assigned budget.

Linux is important if that's what the backend deploys to. If it is, it's a part of the operational envelope - I am saying engineers should have familiarity with what production is running on. I don't particularly care where those skills are being picked up as long as you know that on the production box there's strace instead of dtruss and you know how to check what the D state process is waiting for or whatever interesting issue arises which only happens under load, with networked storage and with at least a couple dozen cpus. (This is also why I don't care for frontend devs to 'know Linux', but having some knowledge about HTTP and their production HTTP servers would be beneficial, as would be knowing that networks aren't magic...)